How Iran went nuclear

In the beginning there was the atom bomb and the world-changing destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the atom was also a renewable energy source that could lift countries into modernity. It had to be harnessed, not simply abandoned. In the gloom of the postwar period, the world looked to Washington for guidance on how to recalibrate the global order. This duly came with President Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace programme – the first non-proliferation initiative. Atoms for Peace gave countries the equipment to start their own peaceful programmes regulated by an international agency devoted to the job (it became the IAEA). Washington became the source of all nuclear materials, and it found a willing recipient in Iran.

Akbar Etemad is a nuclear physicist in his seventies, long-faced, short-tempered, and of immeasurable importance to Iran’s nuclear history. In 1965 he returned home from studying in Paris with many qualifications but no job. According to the press, a five-megawatt research reactor – a gift from Atoms for Peace – sat in Tehran University,and sat. A lack of expertise had forced work to stop and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was angry. Etemad came to the shah’s attention and completed the reactor in 1967. “It was no big deal,” he told me one morning over coffee in London. “The nuclear programme at this stage was almost non-existent.”

After Etemad completed the reactor, he left to work in higher education for a few years. But it was not his last contact with nuclear power. Following the 1973 oil boom the shah called him back: full steam ahead was the order. Etemad told him that the programme needed something hitherto missing: a plan. With a limitless budget and the royal blessing, he created the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) in 1974. He was also made deputy prime minister. From that point until the revolution of 1979 the two met at least once a week. “No matter what he was doing, he still found time to discuss the programme,” Ete­mad says. “It was so close to his heart.”

Why? Officially, oil. During the 1970s Iran was the third-largest oil producer in the world. It was a valued but finite commodity on which to base a nation’s wealth. The shah was clear on this dilemma: petroleum and gas were simply too valuable to burn for fuel. This is important. First articulated more than 40 years ago, it remains the official line on atomic power under the Islamic Republic today. It has economic cogency – domestic use of fossil fuels drastically affects foreign exchange earnings, as every barrel burned is a barrel not sold. From the beginning, nuclear energy was seen as the replacement. “It is a shame to burn the noble product [oil] to run factories and light houses,” wrote the shah in 1961. “We plan to get, as soon as possible, 23,000MW [megawatts] from nuclear power stations.”

There was also an unspoken reason. Glory. Like all dead kings, even successful ones, the shah is condemned to dramatic irony. Ever since Nader Shah returned to Tehran with a stolen Mughal throne in 1739, the Peacock Throne has symbolised the royal house of Persia. For Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, royal glory was foreign policy, and he was determined to make the metaphor a reality: the great tail feathers would unfurl in all their Pahlavi splendour and the world, or, at any rate, the region, would marvel at the display.

The shah had named his country “the Empire of Iran” and “modernisation” was the path to its imperial reinvigoration. To Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, modernisation signified westernisation – and the two were insuperable, as well as inseparable. The means was technology, and especially nuclear technology, the vanguard of modernity. He saw a world where Britain and the US had assumed leadership in nuclear power. Technology brought prestige; it was a laurel for the royal breast, but one that could only be pinned there by a western hand.

Etemad remembers all this. At a general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in the late 1970s he was called on to vote and called his king for instructions: “His Majesty said, ‘You should vote as the developed countries do,’” Etemad says. “We had to act like a western country. This was the point of the programme – to bolster us rapidly into a developed country, to get into the western world.”

And he wanted to do it fast. Despite Etemad’s best efforts to build up an Iranian scientific base, the shah wanted to increase western links. In March 1974 France ratified an agreement for five reactors, with a further two to be built under licence from the US firm Westinghouse. That year Etemad also signed a contract for two water reactors from the West German firm KWU for a proposed plant at Bushehr, to supply electricity to the south-western city of Shiraz. In 1975, Iran also acquired a 10 per cent stake in Eurodif, a uranium-enrichment venture involving France, Belgium and Spain. As his father, Reza Pahlavi, had done with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the shah bound Iran to the west with commercial ties. This time the prize was not oil, but nuclear energy. Such is the nature of progress.

Ardeshir Zahedi, holding a pen in one hand and a tightly bound five-page document in the other, sat behind a desk at the Foreign Office in London between three civil servants who stood looking at him expectantly. It was 1 July 1968, Zahedi was foreign minister of Iran, and he had just signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). “It was a historic moment,” he says from his home in Montreux. “I telephoned His Majesty in Tehran and told him it was done. He was very pleased. We had signed it the day it opened for signature. He was determined to show that we were an honourable country.” As far back as 1968, the seeds of today’s impasse between Iran and the US and other western nations were sown. It’s there in all the details.

“We should never have signed it,” complains Etemad. “It was not a fair treaty. I never would have allowed it. Only small countries joined – Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, the Fiji Islands. The countries that actually had a chance of getting nuclear power – India, Pakistan, Israel – they stayed out. Only we signed.”

One evening in late 1976, Akbar Etemad was having an argument with the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had come to Tehran to promote a plan for US regional nuclear fuel centres in the Middle East, intended to reduce the need for other nations to develop their own sources. Etemad repeated the reasons for his refusal: national sovereignty, the right to pursue indigenous enrichment under the NPT, arguments that would reappear 30 years later. It didn’t seem to be working.

He tried a different tack. “I said, ‘Mr Kissinger, I’m going to talk to you now as a Harvard professor. Regardless of anything else, can you imagine Iran sitting around a table with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and agreeing on anything – let alone nuclear fuel?’ Kissinger leaned back in his chair; he thought, and he said: ‘You’re quite right, it is impossible.’”

Matters only got worse with the arrival of Jimmy Carter and the tightening of US exports of nuclear materials. “This man, Carter!” became shorthand for the new president. “The shah never really liked Democrats,” says Etemad. “He much preferred Nixon.”

And nuclear weapons? In public, the shah rejected them. “The idea that I want nuclear weapons is ridiculous; only a few silly fools believe it,” he said in 1976. As an NPT signatory, he could not say anything else. More pertinently, infrastructure was so basic that any bomb would have taken years. Until then, why rock the boat?

But self-interest played a part, too. In the years after 1973, as money, hubris and repression increased in equal measure, so did the shah’s need for a powerful military. By the end of the 1970s, Iran was what he wanted it to be: a Gulf superpower. “He always said we didn’t need nuclear weapons because of our military strength. Nuclear weapons might actually force others to go nuclear and wipe out our conventional arms advantage,” says Etemad. “But he also said if things ever changed – if our security was threatened – he would give the order. I’ve no doubt that were he here today he would say, ‘Go’; and I would.”

The Iranian psyche is cleaved, bloated with a sense of the country’s historical importance but scarred by the humiliations of the not-so-distant past. The division of Iran into spheres of influence by the British and the Russians during the Great Game, the overthrow of Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadeq in a British and American coup in 1953, the constant meddling of foreign powers – all burned into the popular imagination. The shah believed he was a “western” ruler, but his story is that of modern Iran itself: the desire to escape from the “colonial” father and strike out in the world. His means was to imitate his western role models. The nuclear programme rested on this vision, an empyrean charge into modernity.

But a vision is just that. It will always contract in the face of reality. In the end, royal profligacy and repression – reality – were too much; and the people, radicalised by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, revolted. In the end, as the regime crumbled, it retreated on many of its policies, including the nuclear programme – now nothing more than the vulgar toy of a hated ruler.

In 1979 the revolution changed everything. Iran was tranformed from an autocratic and pro-western monarchy into an isolationist and populist Islamic republic under the clerical rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini brought a new day with a new system of government, and a deep mistrust of the international community. The new path lay not just in 7th-century Islamic history, but 19th- and 20th-century Iranian history. During the revolution crowds marched through the streets holding banners adorned with pictures of Mossadeq and denounced the shah as Washington’s puppet. Iran would no longer be “enslaved” by “imperial” powers, dependent neither on “the godless east nor the tyrannic [sic] blasphemous west”. And it would be self-sufficient.

With the nuclear programme, the Islamic Republic had inherited a symptom of Pahlavi excess. The new government, led by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and desperate to distance itself from the shah’s unpopular measures, installed the excitable Fereydun Sahabi as head of the AEOI in April 1979. He immediately announced that the programme was seriously over budget. The Bushehr reactors in particular had almost doubled in cost to $7bn. They had also created “a consumer market for the industrial products of other countries”. Sahabi declared that a “vicious” reliance on foreign manpower would end.

In future, the programme would “enhance the country’s knowledge of nuclear energy with a view to achieving self-sufficiency”. But this was not enough. On 17 June 1980, officials confirmed the suspension of Bushehr, announcing on Iranian radio that “the construction of these reactors, started by the former regime on the basis of colonialist and imposed treaties . . . was a cause of greater dependence on imperialist countries”.

No longer a banner of Iranian internationalism, the nuclear programme was now viewed as the continuation of colonialism by other means. The atom was not merely too expensive, it was ideologically unclean. In late 1979 the government announced the unilateral abrogation of contracts with KWU and the French company Framatome. Naturally, this did little to improve the country’s foreign relations. Both sued.

Nuclear power is always a statement of identity. In rejecting the programme, the revolutionary government rejected what it symbolised politically: Pahlavi ambition. It rejected a particular form of statehood. The shah had been a western poodle. Now defiant and self-sufficient, the Islamic Republic had found a new means by which to make its way in the world.

But God, alas, does not supply electricity or pay wages, at least not directly. Power shortages and an idling AEOI made energy once again a high priority for the government. In early 1980 Sahabi was dismissed and Reza Amrollahi – a somewhat more reasonable man – replaced him. The decision was taken to start the programme again and, in early 1982, legal disputes with KWU reached a preliminary agreement at arbitration. Agreement with Framatome followed. Tehran was willing to reconcile and beginning to understand that theology wasn’t enough.

In June 1982, KWU agreed to complete at least one of the two reactors at Bushehr and the engineers returned to the site that year. Officially ideology still ruled, however, and the government justified this U-turn with the need for “native expertise”. Through rhetorical sleight, indigenous capability and self-reliance now justified not the abandonment of the programme, but its restart.

The moves came to nothing. KWU was reluctant to work on Bushehr while the Iran-Iraq War – which had begun in September 1980 – was still raging. In May 1984 it said that it would complete the project only when the war ended. The Iraqis had struck the Bushehr reactor, and were to do so a further seven times before the 1988 ceasefire. KWU declined repeated requests to resume construction of the plant, which lay dormant until the Russians signed an agreement in 1995 for its completion. Western co-operation had ended.

The Islamic Republic, however, had bigger problems. It had raised its flag with the disgraceful kidnapping of diplomats at the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979-80 hostage crisis – an act that alienated the onlooking world, including a United States desperate to keep the friendship of its Persian ally. Outraged, President Carter had imposed an array of economic and military sanctions on Iran as well as tacitly supporting Iraq in the war. After the decision to restart the nuclear programme, agreement had been sought not only with contractors but also the IAEA, which agreed to help with a proposed reactor at Isfahan’s nuclear technology centre. But US pressure forced it to back out. In response, Iran turned to the developing world for assistance – Pakistan, China and South America were the destinations. Iran was now doubly damned, first by its own revolutionary self and then by association.

The Islamic Republic was now poorer and weaker and, crucially, alone; it had more humiliation, more rage, and more God. Both the invasion by Iraq and the Iraqis’ subsequent use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers had been met with exuberant inactivity by the UN and the international community in general. In turn, all institutions were now seen as tools of the west. Khomeini had been right.

Cherchez l’Amérique – if there is one lesson from postwar international politics, it is this. Washington had been of central importance to the shah’s programme. It was to be so again, but for different reasons. Necessity had restarted nuclear power under the Islamic Republic. Pride was now to resurface. But it was an altered pride. However much the world “persecuted” Iran, it would not win. “Despite the problems resulting from America’s unfair victimisation of the Islamic Republic and the world’s blindness in the face of repeated violations by the Ba’athist regime,” said a sombre Amrollahi in 1987, “there have been remarkable improvements in the scientific and industrial fields in our country.”

The nuclear programme had become symbolic once more – this time not because it was something a developed, western country had because it was developed and western, but something a developing country had because it was palpably non-western and defiant. Like the soldiers on the Iraqi battlefields, the Iranian nuclear programme embodied a nation’s refusal to be cowed.

Officially, the Islamic Republic rejected nuclear weapons. It went further – it urged disarmament. For Iran’s representative to the UN in October 1986, nuclear weapons created a world where “each day the big powers become increasingly dominant at the expense of the oppressed nations”. They were synonymous with colonisation, the pri­meval impulse of strong against weak.

Iran, however, was also at odds with the world’s superpower and at war with Iraq, which, under Saddam Hussein, had been building its own nuclear capability until the 1981 Israeli attack on its nuclear reactor at Osirak. It had good reason to develop weapons and it is inconceivable that the mullahs did not consider the option.

But the programme was a shambles, the Bushehr reactors stood uncompleted, and the war was draining the country’s resources. There was simply no chance of getting them.

The truth was, as far as the world was concerned, it didn’t matter. In the mid-1980s the US urged a worldwide ban on the sale of nuclear materials to the Islamic Republic. In a declassified report of April 1984, the state department outlined its refusal to “consent to the transfer of US-origin nuclear equipment, material or technology to Iran”. But, in the very same document, it conceded that “the reactors at Bushehr . . . are not particularly well-suited for a weapons programme . . . we [also] have no evidence of Iranian construction of other facilities that would be necessary to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel”. The state department admitted that it was denying technology to a state that could not pose a genuine threat.

The US, scarred by the hostage crisis and later the Iran-Contra affair, now could not view Iran rationally. In 1984, a US senator from Ohio, John Glenn, called for a ban on the export of all nuclear materials to certain countries. With no evidence of wrongdoing, he merely invited all to “imagine a world in which the Ayatollah Khomeini can have nuclear weapons and we face . . . state-supported nuclear terrorism”.

To the Iranian people, fed by government propaganda, the US is denying them their “rights” in the best tradition of imperialism. They have come to see their programme as a totem of their country’s independence. In the words of the former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani, the people are united in “wanting nuclear technology because the US says we can’t have it”. The Bush administration’s bellicose rhetoric, by stirring the nationalist impulse, served only to push a young and vibrant population yearning for social freedom into the arms of a moribund regime fearful of its own country’s demographics. The Iranian people have become reluctant spear-carriers for a regime they dislike, based on theological ideals they distrust, herding them into a future they dread.

The Islamic Republic is a dismal and brutal regime, but it is not stupid. That much is clear from the past seven years. Compared to the meanderings of the western coalition, its diplomacy has been balletic. It has exploited differences between a hawkish Washington and a more conciliatory EU, played on its relationship with the Chinese and the Russians, and always expressed a willingness to negotiate – even if only as a stalling tactic. And all the while it has continued enriching. On 11 April 2006 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced completion of the nuclear fuel cycle on a laboratory scale by successfully enriching uranium to a level suitable for civilian purposes (3.5 per cent). A year later Iran had enriched uranium on an industrial scale. It has mastered the fuel cycle.

As Iran continues onwards, tensions have increased, seemingly in line with Ahmadinejad’s unpredictability. The president has been a gift to those in Washington who urge military strikes. From the mercantile pragmatism of the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to the eloquence of Mohammad Khatami, the variegated friezes of Iranian diplomacy have taken firm shape in the blacksmith’s son from Aradan. He is the hawk’s dream, with his lick of black hair, his beard and bewildering rhetoric.

Tehran has been dishonest about its programme. It has repeatedly hidden the scope and nature of its activities, and although it has not violated the NPT according to the letter of the law, its co-operation has been reactive not proactive, and consistently in bad faith. Yet it is its rhetoric more than anything else that has been used to support the notion that the Islamic Republic is a “rogue” nation. It continues to be seen as merely the sum of its words – and no state is more open to damaging quotation.

The north Tehran skyline is jagged with the steel cages of half-finished buildings. Frozen cranes dot the horizon, a dumbshow of overreaching. As with everything in modern Iran there are huge anomalies with the nuclear programme – the Bushehr reactor, when it comes online, after 30 years and billions of dollars, will supply only about 10 per cent of Iran’s electricity needs. In many ways, it is almost a parody of an efficient, financially viable programme. This strengthens the belief among many that it is a cover for weapons, but the truth is more complex – and more prosaic.

In 1989, reflecting on the Iran-Iraq War, Rafsanjani declared that “the world does not respect its own resolutions and closes its eyes to the violations and all the aggressions committed in the battlefield”. The lesson was stark: Iran could trust only Iran. “We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological and radiological weapons,” he continued. The war is over. But as with Mossadeq, as with the Great Game, it is clear that Iran has internalised these feelings of abandonment and mistrust. Never again will foreigners dictate to Iran; never again will it accept restrictions on its behaviour – certainly not on its “legitimate right” to enrich uranium; never again will it be weak.

Iran faces practical dangers, too. The US has maintained a large military presence in the Middle East since the first Gulf War in 1991. Saudi Arabia and the UAE house numerous US bases, all within easy striking distance of Tehran. In 2001, for Operation Enduring Freedom, thousands of US troops gathered in Afghanistan on the country’s eastern border. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 removed a danger but led to yet more US troops massing, this time to the west. Now add the presence of US soldiers in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan: encirclement. There is a joke that has done the rounds in Tehran for some time. It goes like this: “There are just two countries in the world that have only the US as their neighbour: the other one is Canada.”

Surrounded by a self-declared enemy that has labelled it “evil” and supports “regime change”, what is Iran to do? It can never hope to compete with the US in conventional warfare – nuclear weapons might be the only credible alternative. In 2001, Iran, through back channels, helped the US in its war in Afghanistan, providing intelligence and offering to search for US pilots shot down over its airspace. The reward was a place in the “Axis of Evil”. Meanwhile, Pakistan harboured the Taliban for years only to be saluted by Colin Powell as an ally in the global War on Terror. Many in Tehran have concluded that the White House treats nuclear states differently.

But whether this will translate into a bomb is still uncertain. In December 2007, the US National Security Council produced its annual intelligence estimate, in which it judged with “high confidence” that Iran had halted any possible weapons programme in 2003. Even the paranoid US security Establishment believed that the nuclear programme was a puny target for the US. This dampened Washington’s appetite for military strikes, but not Tel Aviv’s. “Israel views Iran as an existential threat,” a senior Israeli diplomat told me recently. “We are certain Tehran wants the bomb – this cannot happen.”

But might any military action not be a cause for war? “Israel is already fighting a war with Iran through Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south. We seek a diplomatic solution; we are not trigger-happy. But, I repeat, Iran cannot get the bomb.”

Iran now has a stockpile of low-enriched uranium. To enrich this to weapons-grade capability it has to run it through its existing centrifuges until the appropriate levels (about 93 per cent) are reached, though this is not easy. In 1989, Rafsanjani might have wished for a nuclear deterrent, but it was impossible. Iran does not yet have the bomb. The country does not want the international isolation that would follow its attainment, but it could be pushed: military attack would accelerate a weapons drive from Tehran.

The Bush administration believed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions were a barrier to dialogue. They shouldn’t have been. The nuclear stand-0ff is not the cause, but the effect of a wider problem, and it is a political one. Barack Obama has made détente with the Islamic Republic his most audacious hope yet. However, to deal with Iran, we must first understand it. The nuclear programme offers us this chance.

The nuclear programme is many things to Iran but most of all it is the expression of a nation seeking a place in the modern world. It is an irony, and a peculiarly Iranian one, that it pursues the one thing that may bring its total isolation from what it wants above all else: acceptance – but on its own terms.

For 30 years Iran and the US have danced together out of step, always joined, never in time. America’s hand was rebuffed by Iran in 1979. In turn, America rejected Iran’s overtures in the 1980s and 1990s. The disputed re-election of Ahmadinejad has disappointed the hopes of many for change, yet things may not be so clear-cut. Earlier in the year Ahmadinejad appeared eager to take credit for the diplomatic opening with Washington, to appear more flexible. The IAEA’s February report judged that Iran’s rate of uranium enrichment had slowed, a possible sign that Tehran was open to negotiation. And there is the chance, however remote, that a second-term president might have learned something from the mistakes of his first.

So far, Washington, in the aftermath of the election, has expressed only tentative unease about the events unfolding in Iran. What is clear is that the White House has abandoned the aggressive rhetoric of the recent past. It is waiting to see what happens in that most unreliable of arenas: Tehran’s streets. Only the US can solve the Iran problem; it alone has the requisite economic and political capital. The next move from either side will be critical.

The wit and wisdom of President Ahmadinejad

On economic policyThere is an honourable butcher in our neighbourhood who knows all the economic problems of the people. I get my economic information from him.

On the HolocaustThey have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets.

On the 9/11 attacksCould it be planned and executed without co-ordination with intelligence and security services – or their extensive infiltration? Of course, this is just an educated guess.

On nuclear negotiationsDo you think you are dealing with a four-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?

On homosexualityIn Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I do not know who has told you we have it.

On Israel and ZionismThe Imam [Khomeini] said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.

On the Hollywood blockbuster 300Today they are trying to tamper with history by making a film and by making Iran’s image look savage.

On his rivals’ campaign tacticsSuch insults and accusations against the government are a return to Hitler’s methods.

On humourLet me tell a joke here. I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs, or testing them, making them, politically they are backward, retarded.

On Barack Obama’s election victoryI would like to offer my congratulations on your election by the majority of the American electorate.

“I was almost brainwashed by him”: How male YouTubers get away with preying on young fans

In June, a 24-year-old YouTuber named Austin Jones was charged with two counts of producing images of child abuse. Court documents allege that the internet personality – who has more than half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel – solicited explicit videos from two of his young female fans. According to the criminal complaint, Jones asked one of the teenage girls – known only as Victim B – to dance for him, and said: “Bounce again and smile at the camera while you bounce. And while you bounce, say ‘I’m only 14’ 3 times throughout the video.” Jones has been released on bail and is awaiting trial. Jones’ attorney Gerardo Solon Gutierrez points out that the singer is “innocent until proven guilty”.

A few weeks later, a YouTuber known as Durte Dom was accused of filming a 15-year-old girl from behind while she danced at a party, without her consent. “He filmed my ass dancing,” the girl wrote anonymously on Twitter. Dom responded to the allegations via the social network, writing: “the party was 18+, the girl snuck in. don't fool yourself.” He says he will now “start having people sign release forms” before he films them.

These allegations are not isolated. In 2014, a Tumblr user called Olga accused the YouTuber Tom Milsom of coercing her into sexual activities when she was 15 and he was 21. Milsom did not comment publicly on the accusations and was never charged. Only a month earlier, a YouTube musician, Mike Lombardo, was jailed for five years on child pornography charges after soliciting explicit photographs and videos from 11 of his underage fans.

These events set off a series of other allegations. Vlogger Alex Day admitted to having “manipulative relationships with women” after 14 women and teenage girls accused him of manipulation and abuse. One anonymous 15-year-old wrote on Tumblr that Day had sex with her knowing she was underage and “didn’t listen to me when I asked to stop”. Day denied any sexual relations with underage girls, and none of his alleged victims pressed charges. Another YouTuber, Ed Blann, admitted in a now-deleted Tumblr post that he “manipulated” an of-age fan into sex even after he was “repeatedly told to stop”. Like Day, Blann never faced any charges, but, also like Day, he apologised for his actions.

In September 2014, a 19-year-old woman accused the YouTube prankster Sam Pepper of raping her, and another woman filed a police report accusing him of rape. Pepper denied the accusations, was never arrested and charges were never filed. He did, however, apologise for YouTube pranks that included pinching women’s behinds while wearing a fake hand.

A Tumblr post set up to track emotional and sexual abuse in the YouTube community to date features allegations against 43 YouTubers.

***

Social media revolutionised the concept of celebrity – and celebrity-fan interactions. YouTubers are both incredibly adored and incredibly accessible. Products they design sell out overnight and their live events fill arenas. At the same time, fans are often just a few clicks away from engaging in private, one-on-one conversations with their heroes.

“I feel like I was kind of blinded to the whole situation, like I was almost brainwashed by him,” says Ashley LaPrade, a 16-year-old who claims that when she was 15, Austin Jones coerced her into creating sexualised videos on the messaging app Kik. She posted screenshots of their conversations on social media after the news of Jones’s arrest broke.

“It was kind of casual at first and he asked me to model his merchandise for him... so I did. I took a couple pictures and I’m a gymnast so I was trying to like impress him and I did like splits and stuff,” she says. She alleges that Jones asked her to film herself from behind while bending down or dancing. “I didn't want to upset him and make him not like me,” she says.

LaPrade explains that as a young 15-year-old fan she “looked up” to Jones and was initially excited by his interest in her. After she began to feel uncomfortable with his requests, they stopped talking, but she continued to listen to his music and go to his concerts. She says that she only realised the severity of his actions after his arrest.

Many young fans like Ashley are initially unable to comprehend that anything wrong – legally or morally – has happened to them. Neesey Pathan is a 20-year-old student and YouTuber who claims she was sexually harassed by Sam Pepper when she was 15. In 2014, she posted a YouTube video of her allegations, showing screenshots of alleged conversations with Pepper in which he asks her to “do a naked a dance” and show him her cleavage.

“As a young naïve 15-year old girl, I just wanted to keep talking to him because I was a huge fan,” Neesey tells me. “When he started to get inappropriate with me, at the time that made me feel uncomfortable but I didn’t understand how serious that was, because of how young I was.

“I wanted him to stop being inappropriate with me but I didn't want him to stop speaking to me.”

***

Since the concept of celebrity was invented, nefarious individuals have used their fame to manipulate and take sexual advantage of young fans. In the 1970s, Lori Mattix was a “baby groupie” to musicians – alleging in a Thrillist article that she lost her virginity to David Bowie aged just 14. When the guitarist Ted Nugent couldn’t legally marry 17-year-old Pele Massa, he became her guardian instead. Anna Garcia met Prince aged 15 and began a relationship with him aged 17. “I guess it’s kind of a dream to a young girl of 17,” she said in the Nineties. “You can be influenced very easily and stuff like that because he’s 12-13 years older than me.”

It now seems as though a slew of YouTubers have taken advantage of this imbalanced fan-creator relationship, and have deliberately exploited the naivety of their young fans. Ashley and Neesey both claim they were emotionally manipulated.

“I think I put him on this pedestal, which put him in a position to very easily manipulate me and get what he wanted,” says Neesey. “I was just so excited to get to speak to someone who I had looked up to for a long time.”

Ashley claims that when she wouldn’t film increasingly explicit videos for Jones, he treated her coldly. “He went on about how he was in a bad mood now and he didn’t want to talk any more,” she says. “If I did something wrong to him, like if I didn’t blow a kiss or something, then he would make me redo [the video].”

In 2015, Jones was first accused of asking his underage fans to film themselves twerking. In a video entitled “Setting The Record Straight”, he admitted to asking for the twerking videos and said he became suicidal after this news became public. “I’m a pretty insecure person... I began researching different suicide methods. I started planning my suicide. It’s something I was very, very serious about,” he says in the video.

“A lot of times when we were talking he was talking about how he was going to therapy so I kind of felt bad for him and that’s why I didn't really say anything [to the authorities],” says Ashley.

The American National Domestic Violence Hotline outlines on its website that threatening suicide can be a form of emotional abuse. “If your partner regularly threatens suicide, particularly whenever you’re not doing something he or she wants you to do, or when you’re trying to leave the relationship... this is a form of emotional abuse.”

According to Neesey’s screenshots, Pepper flippantly mentioned he was “suicidal” when she refused to show him her breasts. In Olga’s blogpost about Tom Milsom, she alleges: “he’d like sob and cut himself in front of me he threatened weird suicidal shit a lot”.

“Obviously, if someone is saying to you that they're suicidal, you want to help them, because obviously they don't mean it but as a young person you think they do,” explains Neesey. “And you don't want to be held responsible for them hurting themselves and you maybe care about this person because you’ve been watching them for so long. So you’re manipulated into carrying on contact with them because if you don’t, what will happen...”

***

To date, Lombardo is the only YouTuber who has ever been jailed for sexually abusing his fans. There are a multitude of reasons for this. Some victims are too afraid to press charges, fearing backlash from a YouTuber’s fandom. Many victims are unable to see the severity of their abuse until they are older. More still are manipulated into silence. Parents can’t comprehend YouTube stardom, and fail to understand what is happening in their children’s lives. Some victims simply don’t know which authorities to turn to.

“I'm kind of steaming about this whole issue,” says Michelle LaPrade, Ashley’s mother. “I can’t even look at a picture of the guy. It makes me want to punch him.”

At the time, Ashley never told her mother about Jones’s behaviour, but Michelle overheard conversations about it between her daughter and her friends. “I feel like a bad mother. I never even really investigated it. Because I know girls and their drama and you know, [they] overreact sometimes.”

After Jones’s arrest, Michelle wanted to report his interactions with Ashley to the authorities, but she found her local police department unhelpful. “I don't know who to turn to,” she says.

Many more victims are unaware that a crime has even occurred. “When I was 15 I didn't see how problematic it was,” says Neesey. “I knew it was a bit strange, and I did feel uncomfortable, but I didn't realise that he was actually sort of committing a crime in terms of asking a minor, as an adult, to do these things...

“It wouldn't even have crossed my mind to go to the police.”

While the UK has the large-scale Operation Yewtree into sexual abuse by celebrities, there is no equivalent for YouTube. Despite the multitude of allegations spanning half a decade, there is no single helpline or dedicated investigation into YouTube abuse. When questioned on this, a Home Office spokesperson said:

“We cannot allow social media platforms to be looked upon as a safe space for predators to target our children and share indecent images. It is vital that communication service providers have easily identifiable reporting systems for people to flag inappropriate or illegal content – and that they are clear about what is and isn’t allowed on their sites.”

A YouTube spokesperson said: “We have clear policies against harassment and we enforce these policies by removing both flagged content and comments that break our rules as well as terminating the accounts of repeat offenders.”

Sam Pepper is still on YouTube, where his channel has over two million subscribers. Alex Day returned to YouTube in December 2015, and now has over 80,000 subscribers. Austin Jones’s YouTube channel remains live, though he is not allowed to use social media before his trial.

***

“I feel like it is really hard to be taken seriously,” says Ashley. On social media, people are prone to victim-blaming Ashley and other alleged victims, saying that they should have stopped replying to the YouTubers harassing them. “Yeah, we did send stuff back but it was... we were being pressured into it and we didn't want to upset him or anything like that,” Ashley says. Her mother tells me she is glad Ashley “took the high ground” in not sending overtly sexual videos to Jones.

Unsure which authorities to speak to, many victims turn to social media to discuss their abuse. Accusations play out on Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube itself. Ashley tweeted screenshots of her interactions with Jones, while Neesey created two videos about her conversations with Pepper. Although this is an effective, and unprecedented, way for victims to get their voices heard, many online are distrustful of complaints that didn’t go through the authorities. Many more leave misogynistic and hateful comments.

“People will just be absolutely horrible to you and call you demeaning things... I got called a flirt, I got told it was all my fault because I continued speaking to him...” says Neesey, of the reaction to her videos. “I think that's a lot of the reason why people sometimes don’t come forward, because they don't want to go through all that stress again. They’ve already dealt with the situation; why would they want to deal with the stress of people being horrible to them about it?”

Some commenters criticise Neesey and other victims who have made YouTube videos and claim they were doing so for attention. “No one in their right mind would do it for attention because the attention you get is negative,” Neesey says. “I honestly don’t believe that someone would sit down and accuse someone of doing something if they didn’t mean it. So I really think it should be taken seriously.”

Whether it makes sense to those outside of the community or not, many victims' first recourse is social media, not the police or authorities. The accusations about Durte Dom – the YouTuber who allegedly filmed a 15-year-old dancing – were publicised by another YouTuber, Elijah Daniel, on his Twitter page.

Damon Fizzy is a YouTuber who called out Austin Jones after the initial accusations in 2015, and continues to do so on Twitter now. Although he agreed to speak with me, he was unable to find time to do so over a series of weeks.

For many YouTubers and their victims, social media is more important that the traditional media. Perhaps this makes sense – when the Mail Online covered the arrest of Lombardo, the YouTuber who solicited child abuse images from 11 underage fans, they added inverted commas around the word “star” in their headline. If the media and the authorities can’t take YouTube seriously, how seriously will they take accusations of YouTuber abuse?

***

In the past, YouTubers have often been good at self-policing. Hank and John Green are American brothers who run the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, which has over three million subscribers. They own a record label, DFTBA, and run the annual YouTube convention VidCon. Lombardo and Day were DFTBA artists, and were dropped from the label after the accusations emerged. The Green brothers also banned Pepper from VidCon.

After the storm of accusations in 2014, an enormous number of popular YouTubers made videos in response. Hank Green explained consent to his audience, while the comedy YouTuber TomSka created a guide to YouTube gatherings. The popular YouTube duo Jack and Dean even made a music video about consent. The community came together to exile those who weren’t being punished in other ways. The subscriber numbers on the accused’s channels dropped dramatically.

Yet within a few months, many disgraced YouTubers can return to the platform to harness a new generation of fans, many of whom might not be aware of the accusations.

“YouTube still allows them to create content and make money off it, and that to me is just communicating that the behaviour is just not that bad. It’s sort of equivalent to a slap on the wrist and it doesn't convey the extremity of the situation of what they’ve done,” says Neesey. “I think they should be completely ostracised from the community, and have their status stripped from them, and I think YouTube should support that. Because they’re criminals.”

On Twitter, YouTuber Damon Fizzy claims he received backlash from Jones’s fans when trying to speak out years ago. “It’s crazy the backlash I received versus now. I was literally treated worse than the person who uses his underage fans for sexual gain,” he wrote.

And it’s true that YouTubers’ leagues of adoring fans can make it difficult to speak out about abuse. It is hard for many adults to understand how consuming being a young fan can be, particularly when manipulation is involved. When I ask both Ashley and Neesey what they would say to young female fans who start talking to YouTubers, they both say this is fine. Neesey warns that when a youngster becomes uncomfortable, they should end communication, but both she and Ashley feel that safe, normal fan-creator interaction is fine, indeed desirable.

Sapphire Putt is a 20-year-old who claims a YouTuber coerced her into filming videos of herself dancing when she was 16. When I ask if she thinks it would be OK for the YouTuber to return to YouTube, she says she would be “cautious” but “wouldn’t throw the possibility of maybe giving him a chance again”.

“If he actually shows that he’s learned, you know, I would give it a chance and if he would mess it up again then that’s it, you know.”

When I ask Ashley what she would say to people who remain fans of Austin Jones she says: “I’d say that I probably understand... but they also need to understand that what he’s doing isn’t right and no one should be treated the way he is treating people.”

***

The NSPCC is currently calling for an independent regulator to scrutinise internet companies and fine them if they fail to keep children safe.

“We want the government to draw up a list of minimum standards that internet companies must observe to protect children, and children should be automatically offered safer accounts that protect them from grooming and harmful content,” an NSPCC spokesperson says.

“We know from our Childline service that online sexual exploitation is increasing so it’s vital that more is done to protect young people from abusers who use social media to target and manipulate them.”

For now, Ashley is simply glad things didn’t go further. “It's scary not knowing what could've happened, knowing that I was brainwashed like to believe it was OK, and I'm just happy he's not able to message other girls at this point,” she says.

Neesey hopes that schools will get better at teaching consent. “As a young person, I knew I felt a bit uncomfortable but I just thought that I was being dramatic... so I think people need to be educated, for sure.” She says education needs to be improved not just in schools, but in the media.

“Unfortunately, people are sort of used to it now, after quite a few YouTubers, so it’s sort of like, ‘Oh another one.' People aren’t talking about it as much – not that it’s old news, but it’s not as shocking. People aren’t giving it as much attention as it needs.”

The NSPCC advises that if a child is worried about an online situation they should talk to a trusted adult or contact Childline on 0800 1111. Parents can find out more about talking to their child about staying safe online by searching Share Aware or visiting www.nspcc.org.uk

Amelia Tait is a technology and digital culture writer at the New Statesman.